Impossible
by elphabathedelirious32
Summary: Musicalverse. Fiyero runs into Elphaba on a city street between acts and their interesting confrontation leads to the transformation of both their lives. Chapter 21 FINALLY up!
1. A Dangerous Terrorist

_Prologue_

_Silence. _

_What I would have given for it back at Shiz, and how I hate it now. Fate has a sense of irony, that much I know. _

_I am alone, so alone. Shiz spoiled me in so many ways. I grew accustomed to Glinda's amicable chatter, to Nessarose being busy and cared for and away from me. To teachers who liked me and who were proud to call me their student. To…friends. Glinda, Fiyero. Boq, occasionally. _

_It broke through my hardened, thick green skin. But, like everything else in my life, that seemingly sweet interlude served only to make my isolation now all the more painful. _

_I am alone, hated. Reviled. Vile, evil, live. This is my existence. _

The Emerald City

_Am I the only one in Oz who isn't blind, metaphorically and literally? _Elphaba Thropp wondered not for the first time as she freely walked the city streets, glancing occasionally at the wanted posters of her own distinctive green face that decorated the city at frequent intervals. She wore a hood over her dark hair that shadowed much of her face and a scarf that held it in place and concealed her mouth and nose, but it was hardly a sophisticated disguise. She should have been tense and worried, as the other citizens were, running about through the wintry twilight, darting warily in and out of shops. But neither witchcraft nor terrorism were enough to keep the shoppers from their urgent pursuits three days before Lurlinemas. And Elphaba, the threat they so feared, was less anxious than they were as she stood languidly staring at a shop window, gloved hands in the pockets of her black coat. Tonight, she had no assignments to fulfill, no hidden meetings to sneak to, nothing to pass off to another disguised comrade. Simply put, she had nothing at all to do. So she simply stared at the green and gold spectacle before her, until she noticed, in the street behind her reflected in the glass, which she had been watching without even her own conscious knowledge, a familiar figure. _Two _familiar figures.

_Shit_.

Golden curls spilled out from beneath a hat that even Elphaba knew was the latest fashion, so rampantly was it displayed by the shops and so rabidly was it snapped up by the shoppers. The voice she remembered so well bubbled and chattered over the low murmurings of the other's, punctuated by occasional laughs and shouts of joy. Glinda.

And the other. She turned her head slightly, almost imperceptibly, to look at him, and suddenly, Fiyero's blue eyes, bright with laughter, met her audaciously undisguised hazel gaze accidentally and a light of recognition went off in them.

"Elph-" he called reflexively, and she watched as he stopped, as he remembered that she was someone else now. Someone dark and dangerous and forbidden. Someone, judging by his uniform, that he was supposed to hate. Supposed to capture. Supposed to kill.

And she ran.

Her black boots pounded against the lightly snow covered sidewalk, but she moved to quickly to find enough purchase even to slip. She ducked down alleys and twisted through side streets, never looking behind her, until she darted quickly into a foreign doorway and waited, breathing hard, as she heard Fiyero's footsteps slow, and then quicken again, and fade away.

She stepped boldly back out into the alleyway, her quiet evening destroyed, and turned to go "home" when her arm was grabbed from behind.

"Ha!" said Fiyero, for a moment simply joyous with the instinctual triumph of catching one's prey. Then he grew solemn and realized he had not thought any further than this.

"So you caught me, _Captain_. What are you going to do know?" asked Elphaba, eyes and words sharp as knives, as usual pinpointing his weakness.

"I…don't know," he found himself admitting.

"What a tone of authority. I'm quite intimidated and shall surely submit and tell you _everything _now," she went on.

"You're very rude."

"I didn't get on all those wanted posters for my vaunted finishing school manners."

"You don't have any care at all for people's feelings, do you?"

"It would make it easier for you if I didn't, wouldn't it, but I do. You know that. I also care for their lives. And Animals'," she said quietly. "Now please let go of my arm. I won't run away from you. Unless," she paused, "Unless this is an arrest? In which case I'll do all in my power to get away from you, and I'll succeed, unless you've got a pair of handcuffs hidden in those pants, which I doubt very much, but if you do, can you get them on me without using either of your hands?"

"It's not an arrest," he told her, releasing her. She stood straight and stiff, losing all the graceful easiness she had possessed earlier.

"Then what is it?"

"I don't know. A meeting, between old friends?"

"That it's not. Old friends don't chase each other through miles of the city's darkest twists and turns and trick each other by hiding in doorways and pretending to run off past them, because old friends don't know how."

"A re-encounter between a terrorist and the captain of the guard, who once were friends?"

"That, dear Fiyero, would be an arrest."

"But we are, so it is, and it isn't."

"You've beaten me out for most cryptic, I see," she commented wryly.

He flushed. Her approval shouldn't mean so much, but the fact that she was mocking him, however gently, made him feel as humiliated as if she had pulled his pants down in the middle of the street and left him standing there half naked.

Well. Maybe it wasn't _quite _that humiliating. But for some unfathomable reason, he found himself wanting her to think well of him.

"And you get more cryptic. Why, now you're not saying anything at all! How am I to interpret that?" she prodded, half-smiling.

"Are you-" he began, then stopped, not knowing what was going to come out of his mouth. _Are you…evil? A terrorist? A murderer? Seeing anyone? _"Cold?" he settled on at last.

"A little," she admitted, sounding unsure for the first time. "Why?"

"Well, when old friends meet, generally they do it somewhere warm, like a coffee shop," he said.

"I thought we agreed that that wasn't what this was," she said. "A meeting between old friends."

He shrugged. "Even jails are warmer than this."

"Is that a threat?" She tried to pass it off lightly, to return to their old levity, but her eyes didn't lose their wary edge. "Hardly a way to behave toward one's old friends, blackmailing them into coffee shop gatherings. Though completely appropriate for handling dangerous criminals."

"Inviting them to coffee shops?"

"Threatening them."

"I wasn't threatening you!"

"Then what _are _you doing?"

"Last time I checked, I was trying to communicate with you."

"Impossible."

"Evidently."

They stood at an impasse in the alley as snow gathered on Fiyero's hair and Elphaba's hood, and they expelled slow clouds of breath into the cold night.

"Fine," said Elphaba at last, and began walking briskly toward the end of the alley. "Are you coming?"

"Fine, what?" asked Fiyero. "Fine, it's impossible to communicate with you? Fine, we're old friends, fine I'm arresting you, fine, it's cold, what?"

"Fine, we can go to a damned coffee shop," she said. "What about Glinda?"

"I told her to go home."

She quirked an eyebrow. "Dangerous terrorist on the streets?" she queried.

"Exactly."


	2. A Meeting Between Old Friends

"Where are we going?" Fiyero asked Elphaba several minutes into their trek back through the maze of alleys and side streets that she had fled through earlier.

"I have absolutely no idea. You're the one who wanted to go to the damned coffee shop so much," she responded, whirling on him but at least slowing enough so that he could catch up.

"Well, then, maybe I should lead?" he asked tentatively. She made a derisive noise in her throat but stopped fully, at least allowing him to catch up with her.

Fiyero decided to regard this as a breakthrough.

When they finally arrived at one of the coffee shops Fiyero had seen several times before but never actually entered (his crowd hung mainly around the seedier bars of the City, which they tended, actually, to have 'raided' earlier in the day, and Glinda usually insisted he take her to one of the fancier restaurants on dates), Elphaba drew her scarf more tightly around her face, pulled down her hat, then gave him a glare.

"How the hell am I supposed to drink coffee like this?" she asked, her voice muffled by the scarf.

Instinctively, Fiyero loosed the scarf so it fell around her neck. He gently removed the hat, and her hair tumbled down, loose and auburn-black, glowing under the light of the streetlamp. He arranged it carefully over her ears and around her face, and then he replaced her hat, pulling the brim low.

"There," he said quietly, not breaking their stare. "Perfect."

Beside them, someone entered the coffee shop, breaking the silence of the winter evening with the clanging of bells.

She pulled away.

"Don't touch my hair," she said, and he couldn't tell whether she meant it or not, and he had wasn't sure why she had said it, or what else it was that she didn't want.

…

He ordered something frothy and with lots of chocolate, she ordered hazelnut coffee with cream and sugar.

"I had you pegged as the coffee, black sort of type," he said.

"I delight in defying expectations," she answered. "Don't try to peg me as anything, Fiyero. I'm a green, round peg being forced into the wrongly shaped, wrongly colored hole. I'm a butterfly who tears through the pins binding it to the mortar board, who flies no matter how injured its wings. I'm a moonbeam, a wave, a leaf on a river. No one and nothing can hold me, no matter how much I want them to." She looked up at him, her chin set with determination, but her hazel eyes held unutterable sadness. "I'm ethereal, intangible, yet I carry the weight of the world on my shoulders, and there is _nothing anyone can do about it_." She stared at him, pinning him to the seat like a butterfly weaker than the one she had compared herself to. "I'm bound and determined to save everyone in Oz, Fiyero, whether they like it or not, and no one can or will save me from myself."

Their coffee came, and they sat in silence for a long moment, not drinking it.

"I'm not asking you to," she said finally, "so don't try. Please, Fiyero, for your own sake and mine, don't try."

"I can't-" he began, unsure what he wanted to say. This happened so strangely often to him around her, him, the cocksure, confident, brazen young man, striding through life where he had once danced.

"No. You can't. So don't." She smiled slightly, wincingly, and took a sip of her coffee. "Let's be what you wanted us to be, Fiyero. Let's be just old friends, meeting in a coffee shop."

"What do old friends meeting in a coffee shop talk about?" he asked, playing along. It was so easy to play along, to play their roles and wear their masks instead of facing themselves. "I meet all my friends in bars, and they're usually so damn smashed we don't talk about anything, and all Av talks about, sober or otherwise, is how many women he's had. I swear on the Wizard's throne, sometimes I want to punch him in his smug face."

Elphaba laughed, the first time she had done so genuinely since he had seen her.

"I'll help you beat him up," she offered. "And I don't know."

"Hmm?"

"What old friends talk about. I haven't got any friends that I meet in coffee shops, or in bars, except for a few seconds to exchange-" Elphaba remembered herself and closed her mouth. "I just don't usually see my old friends. That's all."

"I suppose they talk about jobs. Girlfriends, boyfriends, spouses. Children. Pets. Other old friends."

"My job involves blowing up bridges, walls, empty headquarters…digging tunnels through to prisons, writing nasty but important messages on walls, lighting things on fire."

"Not killing people?"

"Not me. Not yet. And you can say that you haven't, of course, because of the way you worded the question."

"What way?"

"_People_."

"I'm sorry. I haven't killed any _beings_, either."

"So what have you done?" she asked. Her tone wasn't accusatory. She was, after all, doing what he had originally proposed. She was being an old friend meeting him in a coffee shop, asking a friendly question about his work.

"Guarded bridges, walls, headquarters, prisons. Investigated explosions and socially redeeming graffiti and unexplained fires."

She laughed again, more easily than before, and he laughed with her.

"This is so funny," she said abruptly.

"What is?"

"The two of us, the guardsman and the terrorist witch, meeting for coffee and discussing our jobs as if we were bankers or lawyers or anything else, anything ordinary. We could be anything, Fiyero. We could have been anything." She paused and her tone changed suddenly, back to her false friendliness. "Well, you have Glinda, of course. How is she?"

Fiyero found that in that one instant her smile had become genuine, asking about her best friend.

"Glinda is…Glinda," he laughed. "She's indomitable. Irrepressible. You know what I mean. I love her, but sometimes I'd cheerfully whack her over the head to get a moment without incessant questioning."

"Oh, sweet Lurline, I do know," she laughed, setting down her coffee cup. "I miss her so much. I asked her to come with me, you know, but I'm glad she didn't."

"You are? You're glad to be alone?"

"No. Not for me, for her. She would have been miserable, as a fugitive. I mean this in the kindest way possible, but she's not self-sufficient. She needs attention and approval and praise. I'm contrary. I thrive on conflict. I love it when people hate me." Her voice softened, suddenly. "But not everyone. No, I could have lived that way once, but not after Shiz. I can't abide it." She smiled at him, brilliantly, falsely. "So, pets, we said, old friends talked about? I have a cat. She's not an Animal. She's black and white. She sits on my bed and watches me as I work, when I work at home."

"What's her name?"

"Revolutionary." She gave him another false smile. "No. Raven."

"I don't have any pets. They're not allowed in the barracks."

"Of course not," she said. She grinned at him. "Think about it."

"Ah." _Animals_.

They had both finished their coffee. Elphaba reached into her pocket.

"No. This was my idea. I'll pay for it."

"Fine," she relented, surprisingly easily. But then, she was tired from the effort of maintaining their façade, and perhaps she was a little mad at him. She'd never had a relationship, he didn't think, she wouldn't know: everything was a campaign. "I'd like to do this again," she said when the door had shut behind them, leaving the bells on it chiming in the cheerful warm light of the shop.

"So would I," he said. "Tomorrow afternoon?"

"Yes," she agreed. "Four o'clock." She turned and headed off in the opposite direction from his destination, leaving long booted footprints in her wake.

"Elphaba!" he called when she had gone nearly half a block. She turned.

"What?"

"Do you want to be saved?"

She shook her head, and ran off, into the falling snow.


	3. Wandering Dreams

Fiyero attempted and failed to shut quietly the door to Glinda's apartment, and he could hear his fiancee stir in the bed that they shared, though they had not yet actually had sex, no matter what Fiyero pretended to Avaric.

"Fiyero?" Glinda's voice, high and light even just pulled from sleep, so different from Elphaba's low, enigmatic, rich voice echoed from the bedroom.

_Damn_.

What was he going to tell her?

"What happened?" she asked, emerging as she fixed the silken tie of her pale pink robe. That was one thing both women had in common, Fiyero reflected, asking the very question he couldn't answer, though he was certain Glinda did it innocently and Elphaba very purposefully.

"Nothing," Fiyero lied almost inadvertently. "I couldn't catch her. I looked for her, then I ran into Av, and we got to talking."

"Oh," Glinda's face fell. "I miss her, so much."

Guilt tore at Fiyero's heart, but he merely nodded. "I know."

"Do you ever wonder," asked Glinda, slipping herself into his arms, "if we're doing the right thing?" She was offering herself up to him for a deep, long, kiss.

He didn't give it to her.

"We can't all be like Elphaba," he said, evading the question, and kissed her chastely on the forehead. "It's late." It was barely ten. "We should sleep."

…

Later, as Fiyero lay beside a sleeping Glinda delivering demure, ladylike snores at regular intervals- he had counted them, four seconds apart- he pondered her question, about right and wrong, and Elphaba's non-answer to his own last question. He wondered why he had asked her. He wondered what he had meant.

And so Prince Fiyero lay awake beside his perfect, golden-haired future bride, in the midst of his carefree, perfect life, and envied a slender green twig of a terrorist witch, alone in her garret with her cat and her books.

And he wondered, too, what she was doing.

…

Elphaba Thropp was making a Molotov cocktail. Not the smartest thing to do at midnight in one's wooden apartment alone with one's cat, surrounded by books and papers, especially when one is not making it for any specific, immediate, purpose. But, Elphaba reasoned, she needed to practice. Although she didn't admit it, she also needed to reassure herself: she was right and they were wrong, no matter how kind and…intelligent…a certain guardsman was, no matter how a certain guardsman's blue eyes looked straight into her soul, no matter how his red-gold hair gleamed under the streetlamp. With a groan of self-loathing, she opened her window and hurled the unlit Molotov cocktail into the night, hearing the glass crash with a satisfying shattering sound on the concrete.

Feeling listless and restless at the same time, on edge, and foreign in her own strange skin, she threw herself onto the bed, frightening her cat, and buried her face in a pillow, though she did not cry.

She dreamed of sparkling sapphire eyes, devoid of fear and revulsion, looking at her with love.

Far away, he dreamed of snowflakes in raven hair, and impenetrable eyes hiding from his question. He dreamed of holding her and finding all her answers, kiss by kiss.

**A/N: Short, I know, but the other two were long! And there'll be more, soon. Sorry for neglecting my other stories, I'll get back to them soon. **

**Disclaimer: Not mine, not any of it. **


	4. Wanting to Care

When Fiyero came racing through the doors of the coffee shop, he saw her immediately. Today she had worn a hat with a short veil and a high-necked dress and gloves, but her coat was off and the sight of her sent his blood racing faster in his veins.

He told himself it was just that she was dangerous, that she was so secretive and so hidden and that even though she denied it, she could have killed. Looking at the sharp angles of her face hidden behind the dark screen of her veil, it was easy to believe that she could kill a man and walk away, and think not anything of it.

Then she lifted her head and he could see her eyes, steady and deep and inadvertently soul-filled, through the black mesh, and he knew that she had not lied, had not killed, and that if she ever did it would stalk her, haunt her, hurt her. She could lie, he did not doubt, without a change in the timbre of her voice, she could lie while keeping her pulse steady, she could lie calmly under torture, but her eyes could not lie. Not to him.

"What are you thinking?" she asked as he slid into the seat beside her, catching his breath.

"You're not evil."

"Why, thank you. That's the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me." She smiled, but her eyes went dark.

"No, it's not."

"You're right. 'Why, Elphaba, you have quite a talent for blowing things up into little tiny pieces' is _much _nicer."

He didn't laugh. "That's not true," he said quietly.

"No, it's not. They don't use my real name."

"Stop being so flippant."

"Stop pretending everyone doesn't absolutely revile me."

"Stop pretending you don't care!"

"I don't!"

"No! Stop pretending you don't give a shit about _anything_!"

People were looking. Elphaba threw on her coat and half-ran out the door. He followed quickly, thankful for not having taken off his own coat. He grabbed her wrist when he finally caught her, a block away.

"Let go of me," she said quietly.

"Promise you won't run away."

"No. Let go of me or I'll cry rape."

"Promise you won't run away or I'll cry terrorist." Her shoulders dropped and she nodded her acquiescence. He released her wrist and she stood listless on the snowy sidewalk.

"We've had this conversation," she said evenly, "though last time I recall you wanted me to do exactly the opposite."

"What are you talking about?"

"'Why is it that every time I see you, you're causing some sort of commotion,'" she mocked him. "If I recall, that bit of conversation ended with me saying something like 'Do you think I want to be this way? Do you think I want to care this much? Don't you know how much easier my life would be if I didn't?'" She went on, as angry as she had been that day, saying those same words. "So, Fiyero, do you think if I didn't give a shit I would be living like this? Don't you think if that were true, if I didn't care, that I would be living in the fucking Palace right now, instead of as a fugitive on principle?"

"I'm sorry," he said, "I didn't think."

"No, you didn't! You never do! No one ever does!" She was nearly hysterical now, and yelling, not caring that people were staring at them. He could hear tears threatening in her voice and that frightened him more than the possible consequences of some passers-by noticing a flash of green skin as she waved her arms at him. "All of you, you just wander around, from entertainment to entertainment, shopping and listening to whatever you're told and never questioning! Never thinking twice! Never wondering about what is right and what's wrong, and never thinking that the government might not be a bunch of knights riding around on white horses!"

"Elphaba!" he hissed at her. "Do you want to get us both arrested and hanged for treason? Do you? Because that's what screaming about the government in the middle of the street is going to get you!"

She quieted, but her eyes remained venomous and rage-filled. He was struck by a sudden, deep urge to kiss her, but he didn't.

"I'm sorry," he told her again, and neither of them were sure whom he was apologizing for.

"It's not your fault I can't say what I think in public," she answered. "I don't mind for myself, I'm exhausted from hiding, but getting hanged might mess up the gala wedding I'm sure Glinda's planned, and we wouldn't want that."

"Jealousy does not look good on you."

"I'm not jealous." The irony struck her. "Just…completely green." Suddenly, both of them burst into gales of laughter, desperate, gasping laughs, laughter instead of hopeless, futile tears.

When they had finished, she looked up at him, hazel eyes clear.

"So," she said.

"So," he answered. "Tomorrow?"

"No. I can't." She didn't elaborate. "Two days from now. Meet me on this corner."

"All right," he turned to say to her, but she had vanished.


	5. Trust

Two days. Forty-eight hours. Two thousand, eight hundred and eighty minutes. One hundred and seventy-two thousand eight hundred seconds.

And Fiyero felt the weight of each and every one that lay ahead of him as he slowly walked through the door of Glinda's apartment. _Glinda's apartment_. That was how he still thought of it, although he had officially lived there for three months and unofficially for some time before that. But it had never felt like home. Fiyero realized, suddenly, that he felt adrift and disconnected and that he did not have a place that he called home and never had. He ran his hand along the kitchen counter. Neither of them cooked. Glinda baked, but she did not cook. He wondered why. He had never asked her. He did not know her middle name. He did not know her, he realized, any more than anyone else did. They knew each other's facades, and that they looked good together, and that the Captain of the Guard and the Wizard's assistant on the rise made the perfect high society couple.

Glinda didn't know him either. He had never told her about his parents, his mother distant and uncaring, his father cold and harsh. His mother's miscarriages and stillbirths. The cold dead infant he had peeked at, wrapped in a sheet outside her room, when for a moment everyone had gone away. He had been five.

In that house, it was impossible to care. If he had cared, it would have destroyed him. Glinda did not know he lied when he spoke of doting parents, inventing lies from things she had said or that he had read. He did not know if she lied, too, or what hidden deformities her own childhood had held. Of course, he did not know Elphaba's secrets either, but then he had not been her fiancé for four months.

"Fiyero?" Glinda entered the apartment behind him, dressed for work in an elaborate silver gown and hat.

"What's your middle name?" he asked suddenly.

"Liliana. It's my mother's name. Why?"

"We don't know each other, do we?" he said quietly, not looking at her.

"Of course we do, Fiyero!" she exclaimed, running over to his side.

"What's my middle name?"

"Does it matter? _Lurlina_," she cursed mildly. "Fiyero, we do know each other, we do."

"What would you die for?" he challenged her.

"Wha-?" Her small mouth opened into a perfect, round, _o_. "I don't-"

"The Wizard's government? His ideas?"

"No, I-"

"Me?"

She was silent. They both were.

"That's why we're together," Fiyero murmured to himself, "we're drifting, we don't know what we're fighting for, we don't _care_. She was right. We don't _care_."

"Who was right? What are you _talking _about?" Glinda sounded more irritated than he had ever heard her. He turned to look at her for the first time since she had come in. In the dark kitchen, with the last rays of winter sunlight filtering through the curtains, her lovely complexion was splotched with light and shadowed with darkness. Her pale blonde curls looked white. Her lips were set, her small nose almost- tightened. Her perfectly lined blue eyes glared into his own. She looked _fierce_. A _force_. A five foot two force in her own right, in this one moment.

"You've talked to her," she whispered harshly. "You've talked to her, you've seen her, and you've kept her from me! You lied!"

"No, Glinda, I-"

"Don't lie to me again!" she yelled, and there was nothing high or screechy or faked about it. "Maybe you're right, Fiyero, maybe we don't know each other. But people don't have to know every detail about each other when they marry. The discovery- that's what's exciting. But…" she paused, unsure how she should continue. "I don't- _she was my best friend, Fiyero_! And you didn't tell me! I told you how much I missed her, and you…" she choked on her words, tears forming in her throat and at the corners of her eyes. "You had no right to do that," she stated finally, teetering on the edge of hysteria, and she ran into her bedroom- _their _bedroom, where she refused to have premarital sex with him but did everything but- and locked the door.

Fiyero had no place, no place at all, to call home.

…

Two days. Forty-eight hours. Two thousand, eight hundred and eighty minutes. One hundred and seventy-two thousand eight hundred seconds in which he and Glinda shared an apartment but did not touch, or speak, or interact. Once, he tried to apologize, but she ignored him, fully and completely.

He was right, he did not know her, and he had underestimated her. He had broken something that he wasn't sure he wanted to fix, and that he thought maybe hadn't even existed in the first place. And so he waited. He waited each agonizing second, each minute, each hour, until he could see Elphaba and ask her. Ask her if he could stay with her. See if he could find a home at last.

…

She stood at the street corner, hands in the pockets of her black coat, scarf and hat in place. But he could tell it was her by the way she stood, straight and tall, confident with just the slightest trace of the awkward girl she had once been.

"So you came," she said when he reached her. He was slightly unshaven and looked exhausted, as if the past two days had drained his cockiness and aged him emotionally, if not physically. "I was afraid I had scared you off with my blatant radicalism."

"You don't scare me," he told her. She laughed, suddenly and genuinely.

"Not at all?" she asked.

"No."

"Thank you, then."

"It's only the truth."

"That's a lot."

"I know. Oh, I know."

She quirked an eyebrow at him. "Trouble in paradise?"

How the cliché fit their superficially perfect ex-life.

"You could say that."

"How bad?"

"Can I come live with you?"

She laughed again before realizing he was serious.

"How can I be sure you're not a spy?"

"I wouldn't die for the Wizard. His ideals aren't mine. I don't know what mine are. But you do, you know, you have things you care about, things you would die for or kill for, and right now, to me, that is worth more than anything. You were right, I don't care about anything, I'm drifting, I'm lost. So I don't know how to answer you. You'll just have to trust me."

She bit her lip as if lost in thought.

"Trust you?"

"I've defied government officials with you before, remember?"

"Was our professor a government official?"

"Our headmistress is." She shuddered.

"Don't remind me."

"Please, Elphaba. I have no home. I never did."

She smiled grimly. "Neither do I. Neither have I."

"Well, I don't have a place to stay, either."

She gave him, finally, a genuine smile. "I can give you that," she relented, and she took his hand to lead him there.


	6. Cohabitation

It was Lurlinemas Eve, Fiyero realized as Elphaba led him through yet another maze of side streets and alleys.

"It's Lurlinemas Eve," he told her. She gave him a look that quite clearly said he was an idiot.

"I know, Fiyero. I'm pretty sure everyone knows."

"I didn't know."

"You're an idiot." She looked at him again, more carefully. "Are things really _that _bad?"

"Yes."

"Glinda isn't having sex with you," she diagnosed bluntly.

"No- well, yes- but that's not the problem." He stared at her. "How…how can you tell?"

She laughed. "I know Glinda, I know your friends and what they talk about. I don't know you."

"What's Glinda's middle name?" he asked her.

"Liliana, after her mother. What is that, some kind of a test?"

"I don't know. I don't know her. I don't know anything." He looked at Elphaba keenly. "What would she die for?"

She sighed. "I don't know. I used to hope me, naively, I used to think that's what being friends meant. Now I just hope she wouldn't be foolish enough to do such a stupid thing."

"What do you mean?"

"I know she wouldn't go with me, in the City. But you see, dying for someone is different. It's easier, it's nobler, at least on the surface. Living with someone, especially as fugitives, dealing with that person and only that person, every day, is different, it's committed, it's more difficult. In the end, it might even be the more noble of the two." She looked into his eyes, disconcertingly. "So, Fiyero, would you die for me, or do you want to live with me?"

He stared at her, unable to respond. "I don't…"

"The fact is," she continued, "none of us really knows what or whom we would die for, until we're standing in front of the muzzle of a gun, in that one moment. Before then, you can guess, you can promise and conjecture and swear that you would die for someone, but you _don't know_."

"You know," he said. "Don't you?" She looked at the naked hope in his eyes, that someone in this world was certain of something, and sighed deeply.

"No. I don't." She turned and they continued to walk in silence for what seemed like hours to Fiyero but couldn't have been more than ten minutes. She led him up a rickety set of outdoor stairs before pausing and fishing for a small key in the pocket of her coat. She found it and worked the lock quickly and gracefully. He imagined her picking a lock and the image formed with disturbing ease. She swung the door wide.

"Home sweet home," she said. "No, it's not. It's nothing but wooden beams and nails. Come in, nonetheless. I can't say where you'll sleep, but it's better than out there." He followed her in, shut the door, and in one motion, grabbed her around the waist and kissed her. She kissed him back.

"What are you doing?" she asked, anyway.

"Cohabitating," he answered. "Happy Lurlinemas, Miss Elphaba, thank you for inviting me."

She looked at him strangely, but she played along.

"Anything," she said, "anything for an old friend."


	7. Whirlwind

They cohabitated.

They didn't have sex either, at first. The fact that Elphaba was more whirlwind than woman had more than a little to do with it.

She kissed him, muttered something vague, and dashed out the door helter-skelter, like a fox being chased by a pack of hungry hounds.

"Elphaba!" he called after her as he watched her once again disappear into the snow, ut she didn't answer. He turned around and examined the small room before him. It was not a bad place, for a fugitive sans funds. A double bed was tucked into one corner, with a plain quilt spread over it and a light brown afghan folded neatly at its foot. Pushed up against the foot of the bed was a small, narrow, table covered with neat piles of papers and diagrams, quills, and inkpots. Guiltily, Fiyero glanced through them, petrified that upon her return she would notice any small disturbance in their organization. Diagrams, instructions on various explosives…he turned away, cursing at himself for willfully forgetting this side of her. Of them both, for he found the soldier in him recognizing makeshift versions of the weapons he himself had used. He turned to inspect the rest of the room. A mirror leaned up against one wall, a few thin dark dresses hung on a nail beside it. An ancient armchair in one corner. And the books. Piles and piles of books, under the coffee table covered with candles, under the desk and the bed, in the crates serving as a window seat, stacked against the walls, used as a kind of bedside table holding a small clock and a kerosene lamp- _not Elphaba's brightest idea_, Fiyero thought. A window dominated one wall, and through it Fiyero found he had the most amazing view of the City he had ever seen. The palace sparkled in the distance, as did all the other glamorous businesses and apartment buildings in that, the wealthiest part of the city. And the moon hung full and fertile above it all, creating the perfect picture of fulfillment and smug satisfaction.

Fiyero was quite glad he was not a part of that picture.

Across the room was a weathered door. He opened it to find a tiny bathroom inhabited by a claw foot tub, a small toilet, and a disheveled pile of the remainder of Elphaba's clothes. Recalling the desk in the main room, he wondered how she could be so fastidious about one thing and so utterly opposite about another.

Wandering vaguely back into the other room, he plopped onto the bed and kicked off his boots, deciding to wait for Elphaba in comfort. He picked up the book she had left, spine up, on the bed, dog-eared her place, and began to read. If he was going to live with the smartest girl in Shiz, he had might as well at least make an effort to improve his own lazy mind…

…

She returned after he had fallen asleep sprawled on the bed. She smiled tenderly and arranged the afghan over him. He turned over and groaned, she noticed the spine of her book poking into his back and moved it. Unaware that he was awakening, she yanked off her boots, undid the buttons of her high-necked dress, slipped out of it almost faster than was humanly possibly, shucked off her undergarments and raced into the bathroom.

Fiyero sat up gaping and was still there nearly twenty minutes later when she emerged, wet-haired and clad in a grey nightshift that fell above her knees, leaving her legs exposed, thin, childish, and vulnerable.

She stood in front of the mirror leaned against the wall and began to work out the tangles in her unruly hair. Seeing him sitting up in the reflection, she jumped and gave a choked off, un-Elphaba-like shriek.

"I thought you were asleep," she said.

"I know, so did I." He grinned. "I thought I was dreaming."

She took a moment to process this, and then he found a balled-up black dress flying at his head.

"Hey!"

"You stupid concupiscent male," she said. "You're lucky it wasn't the brush."

He could tell from her tone, though, that she was more embarrassed than angry.

"I'm sorry you took your clothes off in front of me?"

She glared.

"I'm sorry…I wasn't asleep?"

The eyebrows went up.

"I'm sorry…I was here?"

She burst out laughing and clambered up on the bed beside him.

"Good book?" she asked.

"Works like a lullaby," he admitted.

"You're exactly like I remember you," she told him.

"Hey!"

"Let me finish. Pretending you don't know anything, but really, Fiyero, you do." She smiled at him and he tucked the rarity away to treasure.

"I know something you don't know," he told her.

"What?"

"I love you."


	8. Holding On

**A/N: Doing this instead of studying for a Geometry final. What? I hate math. Geometry's not as bad though…I just really do not want to do yet another study guide. And by the way, who exactly let me talk myself into taking Euro? I realize that this is incredibly short…but I like the way the chapter breaks off and I don't want to add anymore. It'd ruin the effect. So more later. Wait for the next installment. **

**Disclaimer: Not mine. **

The look of shock on her face was palpable.

"Well," she said finally. "I didn't…"

He found himself trying to fill in the blanks, as he had in his own thoughts the day they had met again. _Know? Think so? Think it would come to this?_ She leapt up and paced.

"I mean, I wasn't…" Elphaba's face looked nearly pained. "I- I do…I mean, I- are you hungry?" she resorted to at last. "There's a sort of communal kitchen downstairs, I don't use it much, but we could-"

"Elphaba. I'm fine."

"Okay, well, I'm going to take a bath."

"You just did."

"Oh. Right. Well, I-"

"You don't have to say anything, you know. I understand. I know…it doesn't…I know, all right? It's fine." He motioned for her to sit back down on the bed and she sprawled across it in relief.

"It's hard for me to say," she admitted. "No one ever said it to me, except my mother, and then- she…died…so…I just…I don't…"

"It's all right," he repeated, taking her into his arms. She did not resist. "It's all right, Elphie-Fae. Everything will be all right." She stiffened.

"What did you call me?"

"Fae- from Fabala- what Nessarose used to call you, at school." She didn't quite relax, though she made an effort. "Why?"

"It's my, my code name." She whispered this admission as if she were afraid the walls would hear, despite the blatant papers lying on her desk.

"Oh." Fiyero had nothing else to say to that. The unwelcome intrusion of their ugly other lives did not belong in this moment, and he was furious at it for ruining it. Again.

She pulled away, suddenly, and was off the bed and across the room collapsing in a chair almost instantly, her head in her hands.

"Oh, what have I done?" she moaned. She stood again and began to pace, again. "What if I'm wrong? What if-" she turned those eyes on him, fierce and pleading all at once.

"What is it?"

"What if you're- one of them?"

"Fae! Elphaba! I'm not, I promise you! I swear!" He came over to her and took her trembling hands in his. "I rescued that Lion cub with you, remember?" he whispered softly, drawing her closer. A reluctant smile tugged at the corners of her lips.

"Yes…"

"How could I live that day- how could I know you, love you, and still truly be one of them?"

He pulled her against him in an embrace and inhaled her scent. She was stiff in his arms at first and relaxed slowly, finally melting into him, finally trusting that he would hold her up.


	9. Waltz

Elphaba's feet hurt, her abdomen ached, and it was _cold_. She actually did use oil to clean herself during the winter months, due to the difficulty of procuring hot water and the unpleasant experience of stepping out of said hot water into the freezing cold. And this, too, displeased her, for she liked her baths.

Elphaba, in short, was cranky.

She was so cranky, in fact, that she nearly forgot Fiyero was staying with her. She had left the apartment that morning with the warm glow of love secured in her stomach, but the day had slowly effaced it.

She'd been yelled at twice for not paying attention and once for drawing her diagram incorrectly (in her opinion her design was a lot better), and so she was predisposed to anger. When her pistol refused blatantly to fire during the target practice she was using to release tension, she nearly hurled it into a wall before realizing the utter foolishness of doing so. She screamed at one of the leaders and was slapped, she stormed into a corner and fumed for half an hour before leaving at last, kicking every other stone in the wall of the hallway on her way out, and contemplating the dismal prospect of returning, humiliated, the next day.

But, really, she was _fine_.

She risked discovery on her way home by cursing at anyone and everyone who had the misfortune of being in her way. She spit at a Gale Forcer before dashing quickly through several alleys. She stalked up the stairs, frightened the cat, and slammed the door, shaking the rickety structure to its foundation.

"Well," said Fiyero, unwisely, "Good afternoon, sunshine."

He received, in return, a growl and a rather heavy satchel lobbed in the vicinity of his head. "I got us some food," he continued, unperturbed, "You had almost nothing in here. Have you been eating?"

A garbled "Shut the hell up" came from the bathroom, followed by some angrily thrown boots, and finally Elphaba herself, scowling darkly.

"Go away," she snarled.

"Can't, sorry. I live here now."

"You won't be living anywhere for much longer if you keep this up," she muttered. He chose to ignore this threat.

"Would you like me to make dinner, then?"

"Only if you don't burn the house down," she rejoined, calming a bit. "It's too damn cold outside for me to enjoy the prospect of staying there indefinitely. Not to mention all the governmental unpleasantness that would without doubt follow such an act."

He laughed, and she joined him and went over to ascertain that he did not, in fact, set anything on fire.

They moved in perfect rhythm as they cooked together, as suited in ordinary things as they were in the extraordinary. Fiyero could only marvel at this, especially at how his beautiful, extraordinary Elphaba could do such marvelously _normal_ things so easily, as easily as she could disable an explosive (or assemble one).

"Stop staring and cut the tomato," she said, gesturing with her knife, an unconscious gesture that of course produced immediate acquiescence.

After they had sat down to dinner, complete with the cat leaping onto the table and being shooed repeatedly off, to much laughter, by Elphaba- "You damned cat, it's _vegetables_, for Oz's sake, what do you want it for?"- Fiyero pulled her away from the dishes and waltzed her lightly around the small apartment, to her initial struggles and protesting laughter.

He pulled her gently into a kiss, a long embrace, a lowering to the floor, and everything that implied.


	10. Never

"What would you have done?" she asked him as they lay beneath the thin protection of her quilt, huddled in each other's arms.

"What?"

"I mean, not you. If it were someone else who saw me in the street. Another Gale Forcer. If you hadn't known me. If you did what you were supposed to."

"Brought you back…to prison." Fiyero admitted reluctantly. He didn't like this conversation, he hated the traitorous hypotheticals the mere thought of which hollowed his stomach and brought bile to his throat.

"And then?" She prodded. "What would have happened?"

"Elphaba."

"No, please. Tell me."

"They would have…hurt you."

"Tortured, Fiyero, say it."

"Tortured." He squirmed a bit. Gripped her more tightly.

"Then?"

"Tried to kill you with water."

"And after that?"

"Elphaba, please!"

Her eyes were burning. "_Tell me_."

"This is sick!"

"I need to know."

"They would have…they would have executed you." He turned his face aside from hers, felt hot liquid tears form at the corners of his eyes, wanted badly to be sick.

"How?" she asked quietly.

"Fae, please, for God's sake, don't do this."

"I need to know," she repeated. "I need to."

He choked on the word. "B-burning."

He pulled himself out of bed and paced in the frigid air, hoping the cold would cool the fire in his stomach. Elphaba wrapped the sheet around her like a gown and perched on the edge of the bed.

"How?"

"My God, Elphaba! What is wrong with you?"

"_Tell me how they would have done it_."

"You want to know? Fine," he snapped finally, pulling her to her feet, letting the sheet drop to the floor. "They tie you to the stake," he told her, pinioning her wrists behind her for a moment. "They pile wood around you. Ankle high. Green wood, to make it last longer. And then they tie little packets of straw to you. They would probably throw some green twigs in there, too, to make it more painful." She stared at him as if hypnotized, her face frozen in shock from the moment he had pulled her up. "And then they light it. The fire. And your skin catches, first here," he knelt, ran his fingers along the taut muscle of her thin calves, sending electric shockwaves tingling through her body, "And then here," he touched her thighs, grasped her hands tightly. "And here," his hand whispered across her stomach, her forearms, moved upwards to her breasts. "And then here." He gripped her face in his hands, staring into her widened eyes. He broke away roughly. "And then you die."

They locked eyes for a long moment, and then she moved, dashing to the bathroom, where he could hear her retching into the chamber pot. She emerged and half-collapsed against the wall, holding her head in her hands. Already regretting the harshness of his manner, he dashed over to her side, pulled her into him, crooning her name as he would a child's.

"Elphie, Elphie, Fae, ssh," he murmured, "They didn't, they didn't, they won't."

As much as she wanted to melt into him and allow herself to be consoled, she couldn't. She pulled back, looked into his concerned blue eyes.

"Have you done it?" she asked, hiding the emotion from her voice.

"No! Sweet Lurline, no!" he cried vehemently.

"Have you _seen _it?"

"Yes. Elphaba, please. Leave it alone now. _Please_." For the first time, he caught the panic concealed artfully in her face.

She nodded slightly, the gesture belying the words that dropped involuntarily like cold round marbles from her lips.

"I can't," she whispered, "Not that. I can't. No."

He stared at her.

"You're afraid," he murmured, half in wonder.

"Afraid? Of course I'm afraid. My _God_. I-I…" she broke off and looked away from him as she spoke. "I used to imagine it. All the different ways to die…and finally, I settled on that one. You know. Because it's the way they used to kill witches. I guess they still do." She laughed bitterly. "How we've regressed. I had nightmares. Every night…" she closed her eyes tightly and then opened them again, blinking back tears.

"I would want to confess," she admitted almost inaudibly after a moment. "I wouldn't, but oh God, how I would want to."

"Elphaba, Elphaba, no, you don't have to think about it, you don't have to worry-"

"Of _course _I do," she half-spat, angry not at him but at circumstance. "Even more. Fiyero. You don't think they do anything less to traitors than to terrorists, do you? Now there's you, too. I can't let it happen to you-" she pulled away and whirled around and wrapped herself in the sheet again. "It's like a curse…everyone who loves me, everyone I love…you should have never come. You should go away, go away and never come back and forget I exist. Please."

He approached her from behind, folded her into him. She turned in his arms.

"No, please, go," she moaned, but she lay her head on his shoulder anyway.

"I will never go away," he told her solemnly. "Never."


	11. Concentration

She was gone when he woke up. Funny thing, he couldn't remember going back to sleep. Couldn't imagine letting himself sleep after that...

He examined his mind, searching for any remaining wisps of nightmares. How could he sleep after _that _and have no nightmares?

And then he realized that the groggy tendrils encircling his sleep-fogged mind weren't those of dreams, but of enchantment, and he was up and out of bed, slapping the floor with his feet in a sudden burst of rage. _How dare she? _And then it cooled, almost instantaneously: _Because she wanted me to forget, because she needed to go and be alone and I wouldn't have let her, because if she were here she wouldn't be able to stay sane. _

For a moment, panic grabbed his heart with ice cold fingers of fear. What if she was gone, really gone, and never coming back?

He took mental inventory. Hat, cat, diagrams, notebooks, books. She wouldn't leave all of that evidence behind, dangerous as the bombs they detailed. She wasn't afraid to burn bridges, but she was smart enough not to burn them all at once. Not a second time.

But he couldn't believe she had magicked him. And he hated the idea. It put the truth of everything into question, and wasn't that ironic? The truth was what she wanted more than anything to clarify. The masking of the truth was her greatest enemy, the thing that she hated the most. And the powers she hadn't asked for, didn't want, called everything she did, the emotions of everyone around her, into question by their mere existence. Which, like her skin, made her an island. Perhaps no man could be one, but Elphaba Thropp managed it quite nicely.

_A talent of dubious value_, he heard her in his head. Even though there was probably a way that she could genuinely communicate with his mind, she was the sort of person whose remarks, said or unsaid, lingered and manifested themselves anyway in her absence, the sort of person whose forceful presence was addictive. And he knew as if it were written on his brain, the most literal kind of mental note, that she was coming back. Soon.

Elphaba was coming back. But she needed to face head on the urge to lock herself up in a room and never venture out, because that just wouldn't do. Besides, she hated walls and confinement. As a small girl, though she had always done well in school, she had detested the curtailment of her independence, accustomed as she was to running wild through the lands behind the governor's manor, where no one could see her, blending with the forests as she did. She had watched fights, murders, stolen kisses, from her dryad's perch amid the castles of airy leaves that were hidden high above the ground. So the outdoors was precious to her, a worldwide sanctuary that was no longer safe at all.

Dressed like an adolescent boy, she perched on the pier, dangled her legs over the water. Her bare feet took little enough energy to glamour into a normal tone. The rest of her was another matter, she could only manage to hold the illusion for a few minutes before bits of her began to waver back into green. But here, just above the water, she was safest; who would think to look for her here? The Wicked Witch whom water burned like fire. They thought. She wound her big toe in slow circles over the surface of the water, rippling the currents, making the water lap with slightly more intensity against the pier. She submerged her foot more completely. The wintry night had dissolved into a false spring; the snow melted in long thin rivulets that poured grudgingly into the streets, making the whole world damp and warm, like a haven for bacteria. Except for the brightness of the sun, shining upon Elphaba's still-green face and obscuring its color even further with the all consuming brightness.

She considered Fiyero, alone and probably worried, probably angry too, if he had figured out what she had done. But she needed to go, and after _that _he wouldn't have let her. He would have thought she was going to do something crazy. But of course she was _not_.

She considered what she was supposed to do. Simple enough, if regarded as small pieces, individual movements without a coherent end.

But there was a coherent end. Not that she had been told, but she knew. Saying she had never killed, that was a lie. True, she had never stabbed or shot, never taken a weapon into her hands and used it to stop a heart. But the things she had done, all added up with what others had done, how many deaths then?

She kicked the water and sent a shower of golden tinged, anointed droplets flying up and raining back down, staining the fabric of her trousers with little dark circles that within seconds were already fading.

She dropped her head into her hands, her thoughts whirling. Her concentration shattered, her feet began, slowly, to return to their normal color. Horrified, she shoved them back into her boots, pulled the cap of her hat down lower, and set off for her flat and for Fiyero, waiting.


	12. Surprise

After several attempts and three cups of tea with valerian in it, Elphaba faced the fact that sleep was a distinct improbability at the moment.

She and Fiyero had made up from their non-fight- she called it, in her head, a supernova, explosion, burst of intensity- and _he_, being a normal human being and a man besides, was peacefully asleep.

Elphaba wished she could cast a sleeping spell on herself. Those spells involved a complex sort of timing-released counterspell built in _after _their subject was already sleeping. Or else one had a sort of fairy-tale Sleeping Beauty sort of situation, the solution to which Elphaba doubted would be as simple as a kiss from Fiyero. And besides, Elphaba did not like indeterminate unconsciousness. So that was not an option. She examined a series of small cuts on her upper arms, cuts she had been compulsively opening and reopening without even realizing it these past few weeks. She did that when she was anxious. She didn't know if it was self-punishment or displaced anger or what and frankly she didn't care. She just wished she could go-to-fucking-sleep-for-Lurline's-bloody-sake.

But sleep was not to be had. Elphaba heard the creak of the door downstairs and a step on the stair and adrenaline was racing through her and her knife was out from under the mattress and in her hand and she was waiting, armed, when the door at the top of the staircase swung open and a familiar figure stood silhouetted in the faint light from the gas lamp at the end of the street.

…

Fiyero awoke to the sound of voices wafting up from the floor below, which Elphaba had never shown him. But she was there; he recognized the sound of her genuine laugh, not her sarcastic chortle or the cackle she used when she felt like being obnoxious and playing to stereotype. He pulled himself out of bed and ventured cautiously down the ramshackle indoor stairs. Elphaba stood in the kitchen with a middle-aged woman, a woman with light brown hair and pale blue eyes. A black Cat perched on the counter was giving them both a _look_. Another Cat, an orange tabby, was stretched lazily on the table, and a second woman, an ash-blonde Gillikinese several years older than Elphaba and Fiyero, pushed through the back door carrying a basket of food against her out-thrust hip. Elphaba turned, still laughing, and saw him. She beckoned him into the room and he came, stunned.

"Lysia, this is Fiyero," she said to the blonde. "Fiyero, this is Moya, Leilana, and Flann." She pointed, respectively, to the middle-aged woman, the black Cat, and the Tabby.

"Who..what…" he stammered, disbelieving.

"And this incredibly articulate young man is Fiyero," she informed them dryly. Moya admonished her by flicking her with the dishtowel she was holding.

"Don't be cruel, Elphaba."

"I wasn't, I didn't _mean _it."

"Sure you didn't," said Lysia. Elphaba gave her a mock glare.

"They're the first members of the Resistance I met. They usually live here, too, they were all just…out…for a short while."

"We took her in, poor little waif on the street that she was," Lysia intoned dramatically.

"Shut _up. _I _found _you and after Morrible's speech you were only too happy to have me."

"A high opinion of herself, this one has," Leilana sniffed.

"This coming from _you,_" Elphaba turned to Fiyero. "She's like _Ga_linda, but less pink." He snorted.

Flann took it all in with intense green eyes, which he finally turned on Fiyero.

"Another male, finally."

"Finally? Flann, being a Cat, you may not get this, but human males are idiots."

"Hey!"

"So's he," Leilana said.

Moya whacked both Cat and girl on with her cloth again. "Don't generalize, and don't be-"

"Catty?" said Elphaba slyly, grinning. Leilana swatted her with a paw. "Ow! Damn it, Leilana, no _claws_."

"Language!"

"Oh, but you know I can't resist a stinging comment."

"Learn."

Elphaba rolled her eyes at Moya's half-hearted rebuke, but good-naturedly; Fiyero noted with wonder that she was smiling. Smiling, which was rare enough, and when she was being scolded!

Moya took heed of the look that passed between them and a lovely smile crossed her own face.

"Go, go, you two," she said, the grin growing wider. "Out. Elphaba, you can manage a glamour for twenty minutes. No, you _can_. Go out and be in love. I mean it, _go_."

Lysia smirked and leaned against the counter. Elphaba flushed deeply beneath her green skin.

"But I really can't-"

Moya reached over to scarf draped over a chair and threw it at her.

"I'm kicking you out for two hours. Go! I won't let you in if you come back before then!"

Elphaba obeyed, finally, half-pulling Fiyero out with her.

"They're my family," she said, answering his inquisitive look. "I'm not so alone as you thought, no. I have them, intermittently. Especially Moya, she's not active anymore, not really, she's just kind of a general mother to anyone who needs her. But she goes where Lysia goes. Lysia's her daughter-in-law. Her son…" Elphaba pursed her lips tightly and continued. "They've been gone for the last few months. So I suppose I have been rather alone." She laughed. "I'm spoiled, slightly. With Shiz and with them, and now with you."

"Elphaba, having people care about you doesn't make you spoiled."

She laughed but didn't say anything. He wrapped an arm around her and kissed the top of her head. She, for once, was silent.


	13. Mercurial Fortune

Fiyero had never considered himself a truly selfless, deep, or farsighted person, but when he saw Elphaba in her magical disguise he had to admit that he found her far more beautiful in her natural state. Honestly. It was quite a pleasant surprise to him that he didn't have to chide himself for his thoughts in this instance. Which wasn't to say that the glamoured Elphaba wasn't beautiful; she was remarkably so. She was what people ought to see when they looked at her normally. She was also lighter, not just in terms of skin, but as if a heavy burden had been lifted from her shoulders along with the distinguishing stain of her verdigris.

It was quite jarring to look at, in fact. She looked exactly like herself, yet not. The pale color of her skin made her almost more striking when contrasted with her dark hair; as when she was green, she required a second look.

It appeared, too, that Lysia had lent her a dress. It was light blue, a color Elphaba couldn't wear when green, and simply cut, a little large in the waist, where it was tied by one of Elphaba's scarves. Fiyero was glad that she didn't seem perturbed by her disguise, in fact she seemed genuinely relaxed.

"Thirty minutes," said Moya when Elphaba emerged into the kitchen. "Starting as soon as you walk through that door."

"You said twenty."

"You sound as if it's a death sentence, dear."

"It could be, if I overestimate my abilities and go green in the middle of the plaza," said Elphaba darkly.

"You? Overestimate your abilities? Never," said Lysia sarcastically. "Little one twenty pound girl going after burly men with knives."

"I won, didn't I?"

"You used magic."

"Which is an ability of mine. Therefore, I did _not _overestimate my abilities."

"Hah! So you can go!" exclaimed Moya, grinning broadly at Lysia.

Elphaba glared fiercely, the intensity of the look not at all diminished by her alteration in color.

"Fine, then, Fiyero, let's go."

"Have a good time!"

"Shameless harlots!"

"But you love us!"

Elphaba grinned and pushed the door open. "That I do."

…

The thirty minutes stretched into forty-five, then fifty; then even sixty. Magic was much easier for Elphaba to _sustain _when she was calm. When she needed to blow something up with an instant burst of unfathomable power, passionate anger was more effective, or so Fiyero guessed from his various encounters with Elphaba's sorcery. When she wasn't terrified of her hood falling down or her glove slipping to reveal a centimeter of green, Elphaba laughed quite a bit more, and was quite a bit happier. Fiyero was delighted when she let him put his arm around her, and even leaned into him as they walked. She usually wasn't even that demonstrative in public, not that they had been much in public together since they had become…intimate. But the worst of winter had faded, and the day was unseasonably warm. Neither of them wore jackets. Elphaba's long, loose hair was her only shawl. Fiyero was even more mesmerized by it when he wasn't equally distracted by the uniquely magnificent color of her skin. He wished he could wind his hands through it, as if it were silk.

Their hour together was wonderful. He introduced her to the delicious manoush fruit of the Vinkus. She surprised him by translating the word correctly.

"It means sweet, doesn't it?"

"Yes- how did you know that?"

Elphaba smiled. "I want to learn all the old languages, from before the Wizard standardized things with Universal Ozian. I know Old Gillikinese pretty well. I can usually decipher Qua'ati and the old Vinkus dialects. It's funny, I'm from Munchkinland, but I don't speak that one very well. It's extraordinarily hard to learn the pronunciations once you're older than three or so, especially when they aren't used around you as you grow up, and you know we were growing up just as the worst of the bans against the old culture were being enforced."

"There wasn't so much of that in the Vinkus, actually, not until recently. I mean, they made us learn UO in all the schools, and officially the government is under the Wizard, but not much more than that."

"I get the same sense about Quadling Country. I wonder why those regions were left to rule themselves with near autonomy, while Gillikin and Munchkinland were appropriated so- so _brutally_."

"Well, you know us savages," said Fiyero. He meant it to be funny, but it sounded bitter.

"No," said Elphaba, staring at him. "I don't. I know people, and I know Animals. I've only met a few savages in my life, and they all reside right there," she pointed deliberately at the spire of the palace, rising angrily into the sky like a murdering sword. "Indiscriminate destroyers of beings and of traditions and cultures that have been around for millennia? Taking power by violence and maintaining authority the same way?" She shook her head. "Savages, the Wizard and his minions, and so few others, Fiyero. Certainly not you." She smiled again, but almost sardonically, baring her teeth. "Moreso me than you, at any rate." She grinned more sincerely. "I don't read _Ozmopolitan_."

"Neither do I!" he protested, grabbing her hand. She gasped, and he looked down. The slim, elegant fingers he clutched in his own were a light green. She closed her eyes, and the color faded.

"We have to go," she said, seriousness taking over her voice. "Hurry."

When they reached the ramshackle building, it was apparent that the dissipation of Elphaba's glamour was the least of their problems.

They had been raided.


	14. The Stupidity of Nobility

"Oh, Oz, oh, _fuck_," Elphaba said. Fiyero felt it was a pretty accurate summation of the situation. Elphaba didn't give him a moment to voice his thoughts, however; she stalked towards the building seemingly without a passing thought for the danger.

"Elphaba!" He grabbed her cloak and pulled her back. "Are you insane? They could still be in there!"

"They aren't," she said without explanation. "No one is. Except- oh, _Oz!_" she pulled away from him and broke into a run, disappearing through the door before he had even begun to follow.

"Elphaba? Elphaba, what's wrong? Where are you?" Fiyero called uselessly as he came into the front hall. She was nowhere in sight, but at least she had been right: whoever had been there and broken down the door was gone. They were alone.

He heard Elphaba's voice rise in a curse from the back of the house and he dashed toward the sound.

He found her in what must have served as Moya's or Lysia's bedroom, standing in front of an open armoire.

Holding a baby.

…

She had a look of absolute puzzlement on her face, combined with one of unmitigated rage. It made for quite a funny picture: The now completely green woman stood in a light blue dress, her long black hair growing more disheveled by the second, holding a child as if it were a bomb as it attempted to grasp at her hair.

"Fiyero," she said, "There's someone you didn't meet this morning."

He waited, his mouth wide enough for a fist to fit through without so much as grazing his teeth.

"This," she said, holding the child out even further from her body, "is Galwan. Lysia's son."

Fiyero hurried across the room to her, suspending his shock, and took the little boy in his arms. The child was about two, fairy-blond, and chubby; altogether a typical toddler. Elphaba, relieved of the child, buried her face in her hands and collapsed onto the bed, then jumped up again a mere moment later, panic written in her eyes.

"Leilana?" she called, "Flann? Are you here? Are you-" she heard a meow issue from the kitchen and she ran inside, followed quickly by Fiyero and Galwan. Raven ran over to her and twined herself between Elphaba's calves, her mews growing more and more urgent. Elphaba scooped her up almost absently.

"Shit," she said, tears threatening in her voice. "_Shit_."

"Fae, what is it, what's wrong?" Fiyero didn't understand why the presence of her cat had nearly reduced her to tears. As usual, he couldn't follow her gigantic leaps in logic, guided by her intuition.

"Raven's here," she said. "Leilana and Flann aren't. _Idiots_. They didn't do what they were supposed to, they didn't pretend they couldn't…that they weren't…"

"That they weren't _what_?"

She looked at him with watery tears making her hazel eyes luminous.

"Animals," she said. "They didn't pretend that they couldn't speak."

She cursed again. Raven and Galwan stared at her with looks of equal perplexity. The boy began to cry, and the cat scampered away into a corner at the unfamiliar sound. "He'll kill them," she said, pacing, "or worse. Damn, damn, damn it. Moya and Lysia could've gotten out of it, but now that Flann and Leilana are in it, they won't. Those two are illegal by virtue of their _existence_, and by revealing it they've fucked us _all_!"

"As if you wouldn't have done the same," Fiyero said quietly. She whirled to look at him, her eyes far away. She had clearly forgotten that he and Galwan were in the room, quite possibly that they existed at all.

"What do you mean?" There was desperation cloaked in the folds of her voice, the need to cling tenuously to a thread of reality.

"Sacrificing pragmaticism and self-interest for integrity is practically the _definition_ of you," Fiyero said. She glared at him.

"That was a choice that concerned my life and my life alone."

"What about Glinda?" he asked. "What about me?"

"What about you, you're here, aren't you?" She gave him another look, firm and mildly rebuking. "And your life wasn't at stake."

"At stake, what a funny expression." The look deepened into a fierce glare. "Sorry."

"It isn't funny. It isn't funny at all. What do you think is going to happen to them now?" She buried her face in her hands. "Back to the old barbarianism. Witches and their familiars." Her voice turned sharp and sarcastic, biting as the serrated edge of a knife. "Endowed with the ability to speak by evil sorcery, _how else could it have happened_?" There was more than mere sarcasm, there was a fierce and painful bitterness lurking in her tone now. "How else could something so _aberrant_, so _against the natural order of things, _occur?"

He recognized, of course, the shift in what she really meant. He would have been a fool not to. He set Galwan on the floor and approached her with caution worthy of a cornered tiger.

"Elphie, Elphie," he said, wrapping her in his arms. He whispered her name the way he had the night he described the burning to her. She pulled away and collapsed onto a chair, her hair falling loose and concealing her face.

"We'll have to go after them," she murmured quietly, and he knew better than to so much as think a doubt.


	15. Galwan

**A/N: yes, I know, I'm sorry! School is the root of all evil; I spent seven hours writing an essay Friday. That's like going to school twice. Urgh. dies Also I don't have a functional y key, I'm using copy and paste. Also I thought I already posted this...but...apparently not...**

More whirlwind than woman, he had thought of her once, but he had not seen until now the extent to which Elphaba Thropp could take that aspect of her personality. Firstly, there was Galwan. After her initial shock at being left with the boy, Elphaba proved to be more adept with him than Fiyero would have guessed.

"He's crying, and I don't know why," Fiyero told her, making her look up from her diagrams with an irritable expression on her face. She considered the child, weighing him in her mind.

"Change his diaper," she said after a moment. His expression must have given away his apprehension, for she glared at him and said, "My friends' _lives _are at stake, Fiyero. _Change his diaper_."

Fiyero had gone out of the room again, Galwan half-grinning at him in what seemed to be mockery, and laid the boy down on a rug, removed his outer garments, and then stared, utterly bemused, at the mess of folded and pinned cloth before him.

"_El_pha_ba_!" he cried.

She stalked into the room, eyes blazing.

"Fiyero, I _told _you-"

"I know, I tried, but I don't know how," he explained, pointing.

She made a snorting sound and knelt beside Galwan, taking in the diaper's configuration.

"Lysia, I hate you," she informed the ceiling. Fiyero grinned.

"Does that mean you'll do it?" he asked hopefully.

"I hate you too," she told him. "No, you'll do it. I will undo the diaper for you. But you're going to change him." Deftly, she worked the cloth open. "There. Go on, then. Change his diaper."

Fiyero crinkled his nose in disgust and reached for another cloth.

"All right then, Galwan," he said. "Let's do this."

The child grinned and promptly pissed in Fiyero's face.

Elphaba collapsed with laughter, and, pleased with himself, Galwan giggled and clapped his hands as well.

"Elphaba! Why didn't you warn me he'd do that?" Fiyero spluttered, glaring.

"I thought you knew! Being male, and all."

"What does that have to do with anything?"

Elphaba raised an eyebrow.

"That's what baby boys _do_," she said by way of explanation. "It's the beginning of a lifelong fixation with peeing on things."

"How do you know that?" he demanded.

"That boys like to pee on things?"

"No. That baby boys do that. And how to change a diaper."

"My nanny's grandson. And Nessarose." He still looked confused. She sighed. "She taught me how to change Nessa's diapers using her grandson. Besides, it's common sense."

"How the hell is that common sense?"

She shrugged. "You were a little boy. You tell me how it's common sense to pee in someone's face every time they take off your diaper."

"I don't-" he began, and something passed over her face, and she stood up.

"I have to go- work on this some more," she told him suddenly, wringing her hands. "I can't be here- laughing- when they…" her voice trailed into nothing and her hands flew up to cover her face.

"_Elphaba_," he whispered, shocked at this sudden excrescence of emotion.

Her head shot up from her hands, suddenly, her eyes on fire.

"You _told_ me, Fiyero," she said quietly, fiercely. "You told me what would happen to me, and that's what's going to happen to them, to all of them, if not worse. And I _will not let that happen_."


	16. Please

**A/N: I am so sorr**y. **School is evil, evil evil! Except that it's not…but I **_**do **_**have a ton of work. I'll try to update as much as possible.**

**Disclaimer: If it were mine, wh**y **would I be at school? Because I don't think an**y**one who owns an**y **part of Wicked goes to high school. **

Fiyero roused himself slowly into consciousness, unfolding his arm from behind his head and wondering when he had fallen asleep. And where the hell Elphaba was. He glanced over at the other side of the bed, which sat pristine and undisturbed. He checked what had become Galwan's makeshift crib, a drawer lined thick with blankets. Miraculously, his blond head still lay on the small pillow, drool trailing out of his mouth.

Fiyero hadn't seen her in hours. He checked everywhere, finding her at last in the place he had least expected: the kitchen.

Clearly she had been avoiding him; moving her makeshift headquarters from room to room. But when she looked up at him now, there was an inexpressible exhaustion in her eyes.

"Fiyero," she said quietly, almost pleadingly. "I can't ask you this- oh, _God_, I _can't_- but I-I-"

"Elphaba," he answered softly. "Ask me anything."

The solemnity and openness in his eyes broke her. Tears gathered a the corners of her eyes, and she put her head down. Her shoulders shook silently for a few moments. He moved to go to her, but she suddenly looked up, the exhaustion purged or at least hidden, her irrepressible furnace sending out comforting fire from her eyes.

"you still have your guard uniform," she said, not a question. He nodded anyway.

"you know, don't you, where the prison is?"

"Oh," he breathed, realization breaking over him with the force of shattering glass. "_Oh_." His old life, in the space of a few days, had become a mere dreamworld, that some alien shadow self had lived in long ago.

"I still work there," he murmured slowly. _Why haven't they come looking for me then?_ he wondered. A second, much duller recollection came: he had been on leave. This was meant to have been an engagement trip for him and Glinda, to her parents' house in the Pertha Hills for wedding plans and then to the Great Lake of Gillikin for a few days.

He wondered how the propaganda machine had explained away that one and hoped, so strongly, that Glinda had not told anyone yet.

"Can you do it?" she asked him quietly. "Don't say yes unless…" she trailed off, unsure of what it was she meant. He sat down across from her and took her beautiful hands, hands that held a quill so easily and directed spirals of genius against a humble page, hands from which magic burst in liquid silver light, hands that found the handle of a revolver a welcome resting place, that knew the wires and contours of a bomb as familiarly as they knew him- _oh_. He took her hands, such hands, and enfolded them in his own.

"I can," he whispered, "I _will_."

…

"I have to go alone," he told her later, against her skin.

"I know," she said, nearly silent. He couldn't imagine how hard it was for her to admit, how hard it was for those hands to be idle.

…

She would not cry.

When they were finished, he drank her in, the shade of her skin, the angling of the light on her face, the depth of her eyes.

"you should leave the glamour on," he told her, "or have it ready, and a story. Just in case."

"If they- if they take you, I'll not hide like a coward," she insisted fiercely. "This is my fight, love."

"Mine too, now," he told her quietly. "Fae, Elphaba. Don't be a noble fool. Remember what you said, once, about the difference between dying for someone, and living?"

"Exactly," she whispered, tracing his cheek with a finger, her voice thick. "It's you I live for, my love. If you were gone-"

"No, no- you're stronger than that, Elphaba, better. You will stay, you will fight. You _will_."

She kissed him, and he felt a single tear fall into the crevice of their joined cheeks.

"Live," she whispered. A blessing, an imprecation, a prayer, a spell.


	17. In the Thick

**_I'm so sorr_**y it's been so long...Happy Halloween, all. School is evil...and we stole it from Prussia when it was a military state, no lie. It really is evil.

_Fiyero_

Every breath, every heartbeat, was an effort. He was sure everyone could tell from his face, his eyes, his very scent that he had been with her- and couldn't they see, just by looking at him, that he was hers now, and no longer anything at all to do with them?

But people smiled at his uniform in the streets, pretty girls waved, old women blessed him for keeping them safe. He tried for his facsimile self, tried smiling. He thought it the smile of a man about to vomit, but it passed for sincerity.

He had a few moments of trouble opening the door; it was heavier than Elphaba's and didn't require the same small trick of jiggling before it opened. It was no longer his. The man at the sentry's post within was from his squad; Masian, he thought. At the sight of Fiyero, he grinned almost lasciviously.

"How was your _vacation_?" Masian asked, leering.

"Wonderful!" said Fiyero, mustering his brightest grin. "Glinda is wonderful, I'm wonderful, we're all wonderful- may I go on through, then? I've an important lead."

"The Witch?"

"yes- Masian- those rebels that were captured- which wing are they in? I've sources saying that they know something about her whereabouts."

"They're in Section A, Captain."

His heart clenched as if Elphaba were fisting it the way she did her broom or her quills when she was nervous.

"Death row?"

"Especially if it's true they're the Witch's associates, sir. Either way, it's treason."

"The trials are done already?"

Masian gave him a strange look. "What trials, sir?"

"No- never mind. I just need to question them before the- the executions. See if they know anything."

"Already done, Captain."

"I've new information, I _told _you, Masian. I think it'll break them." _Out, at any rate._

"Of course, Captain."

"Oh, and Masian?"

"yes, sir?"

"Could you not tell anyone I'm back, please? I don't want anyone interrupting this."

"Of course, sir."

"Thank you."

Fiyero strode calmly out of sight and then, unable to contain his nervous energy, broke into a run, taking the Guards' entrance into Southstairs and racing down one flight of stairs to the landing, where he at last collapsed against the wall, breathing hard.

He had never realized the depth of isolation required by espionage, the absolute aloneness. _And you've only been at it an hour_, he chided himself, _and with Elphaba waiting at home. She's had no one for years_.

-Except Moya, Lysia, Flann, and Leilana. Who were down there now. Waiting to die.

_Elphaba_

Galwan did not like Elphaba glamoured. He cried piteously whenever he caught sight of her skin.

"Please shut up," Elphaba requested sweetly. "Oh, Galwan, _stop_- I'm sorely tempted to magick you, so I am."

He caught the look in her eye and the stern tone in her voice and began to giggle.

"Are you certain Glinda isn't your mother?"

Galwan began to giggle again. Thinking of Glinda, Elphaba gave a deep sigh and turned back to her papers. The death tolls, near as could be got; it was worse than they'd thought. Ravines full of bodies, lined up and shot, infants no older than Galwan. God only knew how many Animals were left, so many had gone into hiding or had lost their speech. Animals were being born into families where no one dared speak a word.

It was genocide by fear as much as by bullets.

"Shit," said Elphaba, forgetting Galwan. "Shit, shit, shit, shit, SHIT!" She pounded the table with her fist, lay her head down on the table, and sobbed.


	18. Out of Southstairs

**A/N: I am so terribly sorry that it's taken so long. School is the Bitch of Living (go buy Spring Awakening's soundtrack and the original play now, they're only INCREDIBLE) etc. Anyhow, here is the next installment. Please REVIEW! **

**Disclaimer: Not mine**

Section A was in the darkest, most remote corner of Southstairs. Thankfully, Fiyero had long ago memorized its location, in one of his flashes of ingenuity, in case Elphaba wound up there (he had begun to notice that most of his flashes of ingenuity had to do with her). He'd had several plans for ameliorating such a contingency- none of which, he could see now, were any good.

But that didn't matter anymore. He'd the key now, as Captain, and the authority to be inside the cell- and to take the prisoners elsewhere for interrogation, if he wished.

He took a deep breath, uttered an old Arjiki prayer, and opened the heavy door. He saw a flash of dark fur fly at his face.

"Ow! Ow! Leilana! Gerroff!"

Leilana stopped and perched herself atop his head.

"you know my name?"

"Of course he does, you stupid Cat, you've _met_ him," said Flann, emerging from beneath the hay. "He's Elphie's friend."

Leilana's face appeared, upside down, in front of his own.

"Oh," said Leilana flippantly. "I have, haven't I? Well, hello-"

"Fiyero," said Fiyero, half-disbelieving.

"Fiyero," repeated Leilana. Then: "you'd like me to get off your head now, wouldn't you?"

"That would be preferable," said Fiyero faintly. Without further ado, she leapt off of his head, sending him stumbling back a few paces. "Now, then, if you're not here to torture us, what _do_ you want?"

Fiyero and Flann stared at her.

"To…rescue you," said Fiyero.

"Oh- well, in that case, proceed."

Fiyero pulled a loop of rope from his belt.

"I'm sorry," he muttered, "but I have to."

Leilana and Flann submitted to this indignity without a word amiss. Leilana's eyes were dark and silent in a way that reminded him comfortingly of Elphaba.

"Come on," he urged, "we've got to find Moya and Lysia, and fast."

Fiyero gathered the Cats in his arms and dashed into the hallway, hurriedly peering into cell after cell.

"Moya!" he cried at last, nearly forgetting himself in his delight as he flung open the heavy wooden door. "Oh, shit," he murmured, for Moya lay on the floor, lip split, eyes blackened, body bruised. "Sweet Lurline," he whispered to himself, loosing the Cats and kneeling beside her, checking her pulse. "Oh thank God, she's alive."

Fiyero bent to scoop up Moya, and as he did, the sound of booted feet echoed down the hall.

"They're coming for us," said Flann.

"No shit, you idiot," Leilana answered.

"We've got to get Lysia, come on, move!" cried Fiyero, gathering Moya in his arms. He burst out the door, dragging the Cats along behind him. The soldiers were down the hall, dragging a beaten, tattered Lysia from her cell.

"Shit!" he cursed without thinking, and they turned to look at him. "I need- I need to question her," he stammered, but with Moya in his arms he was hardly convincing.

"What the hell are you doing, Tiggular?" one of them asked. Masian. "Glinda came by. I know you didn't go on that trip with her. Where the hell have you been?"

Fiyero ran. He ran and ran and ran, down and back up and out until he finally pulled the Cats and Moya out a secret exit into the courtyard where secret executions were held, and out then through the barracks and into the street. And then he kept running, all the way to Elphaba, because only she could save him.

_Elphaba, some time earlier_

Galwan had finally, thank God, fallen asleep, and Elphaba had taken Fiyero's advice and magicked all the Resistance papers into an invisible pocket. She was pacing, trying to read, and pacing again. She concentrated on Fiyero but was too anxious and could see nothing. She lay down beside Galwan, at last, and fell asleep.

She was awoken by pounding on the door followed immediately by Galwan's sharp cry.

"Open up in the name of the Wizard!"

She dashed downstairs, a crying Galwan in her arms, and flung open the door.

"What in the name of the Unnamed God d'you mean busting in here and waking him?" she demanded, thankful for Fiyero's advice and aware that in her glamoured state with a child on her hip she was free to speak nearly as she would ordinarily and have not the least suspicion of witchery thrown upon her. She summoned the threat of tears into her voice. "I _just _got him to sleep, and you come in here and make him cry again! Oh, for heaven's sakes! How am I to do _an_ything!"

The leader, a young man about her own age, perhaps even younger, shifted from foot to foot.

"I'm sorry, miss," he stammered.

"Well, you should be," she said. "What do you want with me, anyhow. I can't have done anything illegal- I don't have the time or energy, anyway, with him waking up like this day and night."

"We'd captured several rebels here earlier," he said. "We'd gotten a report that they were connected to the Witch."

"Oh dear," she answered with as much sincerity as she could muster. "you can't be talking about our boarders? Such nice women, and their cats? No, no, it couldn't be…"

"I'm sorry, miss," he answered. "Boarders, you say?"

"yes," Elphaba answered, and beneath her skirt she contorted her fingers, turned her head away as if to sneeze, and muttered a couplet of a spell to convince the soldiers.

"Thank you for your information, miss," he said. "I'm terribly sorry to have bothered you. We'll just be off now."

"Good, go, he might be going back to sleep, so be quiet about it!"

They were, and Elphaba pulled the door shut and fell laughing against it.

"They apologized, Galwan, so they did, to me! To the Witch!"

The boy gave an answering giggle and reached for Elphaba's nose.

It wasn't much later that Fiyero came racing up the alley, Moya and the Cats in tow.


	19. And Back Again

She ran from the doorstep without thought, moving by instinct alone, boots skimming over the streets, and pulled the four ragged creatures inside with near superhuman energy, taking Moya from Fiyero's limp arms and laying her down in a back room upon a bed, and reaching for him then, taking him and kissing him hard.

"Where is Lysia?" she asked, then and only then. He would not meet her eyes. "They took her, and saw us, and I had to run." Her eyes went wide with fury.

"Took her _where_?" she asked tersely.

"They were on death row," is all he said.

"Oh, _mo stor_, it's not your fault. What demon would I have for a heart if I blamed you?" She was already grabbing her coat. "Stay with Galwan- here, Fiyero, I'll give you a glamour, change out of that uniform, please-" she muttered a few words and a strange sensation tingled over his face, a tenth of the discomfort of a rubber mask. She whispered a few other words and her own skin shone green again. A few more, and her hat and broom had flown from upstairs and into her hands. Fiyero gaped openmouthed; he had never before seen her use magic so gratuitously.

"We haven't time," she told him strictly, and kissed him again. "I'm off, love." She dashed out the back door and he heard her laugh with frightening ferocity as she went soaring into the darkening winter sky.

…

They burned people in the courtyard behind the prison, where there was enough room for the public. The charges had been read and they were setting match to wood when Elphaba landed, feline-light, on the roof of the building facing the courtyard, where no one could see her, so fixed were there eyes upon the spectacle before them. Lysia's eyes burned brighter than the flames licking her feet, her defiance evident even as she bent her head with coughing. And Elphaba had, still, to wait. Her body tensed to pounce, she counted the agonizing seconds as the men moved slowly away from the fire, sure in the security of the bonds around Lysia's hands.

It had been burning for several minutes before she arrived, and it burned for several fateful minutes more before she deemed it safe to fly.

"Damn you to hell for your inhumanity," she cried, only half in her Witch's voice, but she no longer needed it to inspire fear. "How _dare _you presume to murder this woman without trial or evidence?" Her knife was in her hand, gleaming silver, reflecting the firelight, as she swooped, cutting Lysia's bonds with one tight pass and grasping the woman with a second, the rushing air extinguishing the flames at the base of her prisoner's gown. The crowd, even the guards and executioner, had made it easy for her, ducking in terror as she skyrocketed off, carrying Lysia, unconscious from the fumes, along with her.

When she arrived, Moya had awoken and was ordering Fiyero about the kitchen from the back room, cuddling Galwan against her in bed.

"Oh, sweet Lurlina be praised," she said when Elphaba practically fell through the door under Lysia's weight. "Is she all right?"

"I've no idea," Elphaba growled, "let me get a look at her first." She lay Lysia gently down on the floor. "Well, get pillows and blankets then, for the love of God," she said, and sent Fiyero scurrying for them, so furious was her look.

She knelt at Lysia's side, her dark skirts pooling on the worn wood floor.

"It's bad," she said grimly, examining the burns on her legs and wrists, the bruises on her body. She lay her dark head against Lysia's belabored chest and listened to her hoarse breathing. "Smoke inhalation," she said. "Book, goddamnit, get yourself down here!" And the Grimmerie flew to her, as if her magic were more intense in her calmly anxious state.

Her quietness unnerved Fiyero as he stumbled out of the way of the flying book before taking the last two steps at a run and depositing the requested pillow and blankets at her side. She did not even spare them a glance, but flipped rapidly through the book, eyes dark and fearfully intense. She stopped flipping, chanted a spell, leaving Fiyero and Moya in shocked awe. Not even Galwan made a sound. Her strange syllables grew more and more frantic, as if she were gasping for breath and panicking at last, until she collapsed, exhausted, over her bent knees and began to sob.

"Elphie, Elphie, what's wrong, what is it?" He knelt beside her, taking her into his arms.

"It didn't work," she cried, "Oh, Fiyero, it didn't _work_!"

He stared up at Moya, regarded Lysia's still form, and wondered what on earth she meant.


	20. Prognosis

"What do you mean, it didn't work?" Moya was the first to speak. Elphaba pulled her head from her hands.

"It means she may die," Elphaba said. "It means she's too far gone for magic to save her, lest I mess matters up further." Elphaba stood, slowly, and magicked Lysia's limp form into the air, over the rough wooden boards, and into the back room where they had found Galwan after the raid, onto a mattress much like Elphaba's upstairs. Using her hands as measuring tools, slow and graceful, Elphaba tenderly lowered her to the bed, and took the blanket Fiyero had brought, to cover her. Galwan cried quietly for his mother in Moya's arms.

"We need a doctor," Elphaba said, fretting with her hands. "Glamours for everyone, all but me try to stay out of sight as much as possible, I may not be able to sustain them. With a wave of her hand her skin whitened again, her clothes changed color to a vibrant blue, and Fiyero felt the sensation of a mask fall again over his face. Elphaba pulled on her black coat and stormed out into the streets.

Moya wiped a cloth tenderly over Lysia's brow. Galwan lay quietly beside his mother, nearly asleep. Fiyero coughed uselessly. Moya looked up.

"Is…she's your daughter in law, isn't she?" Fiyero asked. Moya's expression showed surprise.

"yes."

"Elphaba told me. Where- what happened to your son?"

"He died," she said harshly. "On a mission, for the Resistance."

"Oh," Fiyero said quietly. "I'm sorry."

"That's why I can't lose her too," Moya said painfully, looking down at Lysia. "I can't."

"you won't," said Elphaba briskly, reentering the room with a small, nervous-looking man in tow. "I promise." She turned to the doctor. "Here she is, if you can't tell which one you're an absolute moron."

Moya drew her aside.

"Where's the Resistance's doctor?" she hissed in a whisper. Elphaba gave her a grim look.

"I _don't _know."

"Smoke inhalation," the doctor pronounced.

"I _told _you that," Elphaba snapped. "Can you _fix _her?"

The man hemmed and hawed over Lysia's prone form, at one point nearly knocking Galwan from the bed. Fiyero snatched the child and followed Elphaba and Moya into the corner.

"Where did you _get _him?"

"Shut the hell up," Elphaba answered irritably. "I hate everyone." Fiyero wisely obeyed and retreated further into the back corner.

…

The doctor's opinion was utterly useless.

"We can't tell the extent of the damage," he said, ignoring the fact that for all his intents and purposes there was no 'we.'

"Well, isn't that a great fucking help," said Elphaba. The doctor glared at her.

"That's not ladylike speech," he said.

"Do you see any damn ladies?" she demanded. "No. And you, _sir_, had _best_ tell me what is wrong with my friend!"

"Smoke inhalation can develop into pneumonia, or not," said the doctor. "We don't know." He turned to go and stopped short, giving Elphaba a curious look.

"_What_?" she snapped.

"I was just wondering- how did she manage to _get _smoke inhalation when none of the rest of you seem to have been through a fire?"

"Goodbye, Doctor," said Elphaba harshly, and pushed him out the door.


	21. What Might Have Been

**A/N: I am terribly sorry it's taken so long. Junior year is like death, but with homework. And SATs and ACTs and APs and WTF…a **_**lot **_**of that last, I might add. O the inescapable futility…anyhow, reviews are much appreciated and virtual baked goods will be distributed in thanks for them. **

**Disclaimer: Not mine. **

Lysia lingered for about a week, torturously coughing, a week in which Elphaba was nowhere to be found, having made herself scarce, and Moya was occupied constantly by her vigil at Lysia's bedside. So the care of Galwan fell to Fiyero. He was inexperienced with the child, and the boy probably suffered from his clumsy care, but there was nothing to be done. Elphaba, surprisingly capable with the child as she was, was gone out almost always, occasionally creeping into bed past midnight, but always gone again at dawn. But when Lysia finally slipped away- which Elphaba knew because she felt it, the little sigh of spirit separating itself from body- and which Fiyero knew because he heard Moya's banshee scream, he felt within himself a certainty of where Elphaba was.

He climbed out through their bedroom window, onto the sloping plane of the shingled roof. And there she was, knees to chest, staring at the palace spires. He could feel the guilt rolling off of her in waves.

"Oh, Elphaba," he whispered. She didn't flinch. She had noted his presence already. "It's not your fault," he said.

"It is. I'm a danger to whoever I'm with, Fiyero. Everyone hates me."

"They're in the Resistance, Fae. They know the risks."

She did flinch at his use of the name. "Don't."

"What?"

"Call me that. Not now. Please." He was wounded, but tried not to show it. Not that she was even looking at him. Still, he was certain she would be able to sense a change in his facial expression from where she sat, staring out at the sun descending slowly behind the glowing emerald loops of the fantastical palace architecture. He was overcome again by a sense of her magic, of who she was, sitting not six feet away curled up into herself as small as possible, looking like a lost little girl.

"Elphie," he said, to bring her back to the girl he knew. But that only made him think of how once she would have stood and glared at him for calling her _that_, just because it was a nickname too perky for her taste, given her by a roommate she wasn't yet sure of. She wasn't sure of anything, then, but none of them were, and it didn't matter. They weren't supposed to be sure. He felt the lost days of a partial childhood, of youth, pull painfully at his heartstrings, and he was overcome by it all. He stepped forward lurchingly and collapsed beside her on the roof.

"I miss Shiz," he said in a small voice that he didn't think had ever heard outside of his heart before.

She turned and stared at him. "God," she said. "Shit. Fuck. It wasn't supposed to be like this, was it?"

"How else should it have been?" It was a genuine question.

She let her head fall onto her knees, laughing hysterically, half-silently. "How else _should _we have been, Fiyero? Really? What could we have done? Should I have, what, become a _historian_, then? And you, what would you do?"

"What did you want to do, before?" he asked, slightly hurt by her bitter, caustic tone.

"I don't know," she said thoughtfully. "I loved books and history, and biology…logic. The way things fit together. I think perhaps I ought to have had something to do with the law, if the laws had any logic under the Wizard." She shook her head ruefully. "Well, I do, don't I, I flout the laws. I subscribe to a higher law but not a higher power. I don't know what I would have done, Fiyero. They don't award higher degrees to women, many of them, like law or medicine. But I was never going to be a wife and mother, I wasn't born for an ordinary life. I think I should have become a professor, in the end- but maybe there wasn't anything else. Maybe somehow I was born for this, though I don't really believe in fate. But I do seem strangely destined for it, don't I?"

"I can't imagine you doing anything else, though I can still hardly conceive of you doing this," he said truthfully.

"Me either," she laughed. "What would you have become, if not reluctant, recalcitrant Captain of the Guard?"

"I'd have gone home and waited for my father to abdicate," he said. "Got married to someone, probably loitered making a mess of things for a while before settling down to actually learn to run a country- a province, whatever." He reached out for her, hesistantly, and she lay her head against his shoulder, a surprising gesture of tenderness, a surprising potential allowance of vulnerability.

"I like this better," she said. Together, they stood, and, holding hands, climbed through the window and went down to face the waiting death.


	22. Decisions

**A/N: …hiiii…um… college ate my life? Sorry!!! I can't even express how sorry I am to have abandoned you all so entirely…if any of you are even still there, reading this? **

**Disclaimer: Not mine. **

The funeral was simple. Six men from the Resistance, masked as much as possible, carried the coffin from the Church of St. Glinda to the small urban cemetery along the route least likely to attract official notice. Elphaba was veiled in black, and Fiyero's hat was pulled low. Moya's face was the only one fully exposed, raw and rugged as wind over cliffs. Galwan sat in her arms, pulling at her hair, demanding to know where his mama was. The third time his voice rose, plaintive above the minister's chanting, Elphaba's gloved hand whirled through the air like a pinwheel, settling finally in a death grip on her own jaw, and fled the cemetery.

She ran through the drizzle, back to the church, where she collapsed against an alley wall. Images of her own mother's funeral slipped frantically through her head. Little feet in black stockings in her little button boots, clicking on the rain-wet pavement. The gleam of the coffin at the head of the church. Her green hand on it, in a patch of blue light from the stained glass window, looking almost normal. The pallid sickness of her mother's face beneath her dark hair, the contrast garish. She didn't remember what she had done—tugged at her mother, probably, asked her to wake up in a small reedy voice like Galwan's—but her father had pulled her by the arm out of the church and left her in the vestibule while Nessa cried inside in her nanny's arms.

She heard footsteps slicking past the alley. _Fiyero_, _skulking after me in side streets again? _

He stilled, as if he had heard her thought, and she curled in tighter, indifferent. _If he finds me, he finds me. _

"Elphaba?"

She wasn't sure whether to be irritated or relieved when she heard him come toward her and felt his heat in front of her. She raised her eyes.

"Hi," she said.

"Hi," he answered. "Are you all right?"

"Yes…no…of course not, not really, Lysia's dead."

"It's not your fault."

"That doesn't matter. "

"No, it doesn't." He sat beside her and she let him drape his arm over her.

"She's just…gone, from the world, from everything, forever…she was here, and she's not, and I don't…why does it _happen _this way?"

"Maybe she's not gone forever, Fae, maybe she's just not here."

Elphaba snorted and grabbed at her bootlaces, fidgeting. "Of course. The Great Land of Eternal Happiness in the Sky, I forgot. Forgive me, but as I haven't believed it since I was thirteen , my recollections were a bit far from the forefront."

"You're disapproving."

"Of closeminded adults participating in a great conspiracy to delude themselves and everyone else into believing assorted fairy tales that end up getting people killed? Whyever would I disapprove of that?"

"Have you ever thought maybe you're a little closeminded about certain things?"

"I believe what my reason leads me to, Fiyero."

"Your reason isn't infallible."

"It's better than letting my desires lead me. You think I don't wish I had the capacity to believe my mother and Lysia and everyone else are happily singing in some paradise full of sunlight? Of _course_ I do, sometimes more than anything. I wish I could believe in some benevolent figure looking out for us all, but I _can't_. I'm not configured that way. I see the world and the world tells me if there is an Unnamed God he's a sadistic, petty little bastard."

"Elphaba--"

"Don't try to tell me otherwise, Fiyero. It'll only make me cross at you."

"All right." He let her lean her head against his shoulder. Somewhere in the distant bowels of the city, sirens wailed. The bells above them began to clang.

"Cacophony," she said. "Pandemonium."

"Are you just throwing out words or did that mean something?"

"If you'd paid attention in Old Ozian Literature, it would."

"What a good thing that I have you here to educate me then,hmm?"

"I suppose. Well, it was in a verse poem, from well before the Wizard, during the interregnum of Osgard the Terrible, before Ozma the Universal was able to retake control, and…"

But he could only distract her for so long.

Eventually, he had to bring her back to the house, and as they approached, she got quiet.

"I think I should move out," she said.

It spoke to how deeply he felt about her that the first thing that hit him about that sentence was _I. _

"I?" he said.

"I'm dangerous," she said.

"I'm a fugitive, too," he said. "Don't be a martyr, Elphaba."

"Fine," she said. "Do what you like; experience has shown I can't hide from you. But I'm leaving this house. I can't live here with Moya and Galwan and be a danger to them every moment I'm alive. I won't have them dragged into this. They've lost enough."

"Moya won't let you," Fiyero said.

"Good job no one's going to tell her, then, isn't it," Elphaba responded in the quick Gillikin slang she'd picked up from Glinda. It always sounded so much more authoritative when she used it. On Glinda, like so many things, it was silly.

Elphaba shot Fiyero a glare, as though she knew he was being cruel to her friend in his head. He grinned back at her.

"How are we going to get out without her knowing?"

"Magic," Elphaba said, "and effort," and she hiked up her skirts and began climbing for the low overhang of the roof outside their bedroom.

Shrugging, he reached for an outcrop of brick and began, like always, to follow her.


End file.
